Yesterday, after the Amazon outage, I tweeted a comment highlighting the difficulties faced by AWS customers (applicable, in general, to all public cloud customers) when there is an outage. It was a tweet meant to highlight how desperate the situation becomes for AWS customers as well as AWS employees. I compared the situation after such outages with the kind of issues organizations in New York were facing after 9/11 in the context of business continuity.

Please keep in mind that I have included “for stake holders” in my comments and have added a hashtag to make a disclaimer about the very comparison of the two situations.

To this tweet, I get a pretty reasonable response from a tech journalist though it is quite possible that she didn’t get the context in which I am talking and the audience I am addressing through Twitter (folks with deep interest in cloud computing).

It was followed by another tweet that was pretty much clueless about the context in which I am making a comparison between AWS outage and 9/11. She picked on the response of Ms. Clay to my original tweet and added her own take (and it has no bearing to what I was talking in the organizational context in the aftermath of 9/11).

Soon there was another response to it which directly ridiculed me for my tweet

Though Ms. Bolsinger didn’t intend to bully me, it was a pretty bad response to my original tweet that was made regarding the issues faced by organizations in the aftermath of AWS outage. But this response highlights a fact about social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, etc.. The mass hysteria and real lack of attention among the people using these tools could end up having disastrous consequences. The recent increase in online bullying is a fallout of such hysteria we see in these sites. Just look at what people could say on a commentary on technology under the cover of “patriotism”. Think about how such mass hysteria can impact a commentary on socio-political issues. If you thought the impact of 24/7 news media is a problem, the social media driven hysteria is going to be a much bigger problem. May be Nick Carr’s assertion on The Shallows needs a serious consideration!! #enufsaid

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Director, OpenShift Strategy at Red Hat. Founder of Rishidot Research, a research community focused on services world. His focus is on Platform Services, Infrastructure and the role of Open Source in the services era. Krish has been writing @ CloudAve from its inception and had also been part of GigaOm Pro Analyst Group. The opinions expressed here are his own and are neither representative of his employer, Red Hat, nor CloudAve, nor its sponsors.

10 responses to “Social Media Hysteria”

Actually I think your critics got it exactly right. Your original comment was asinine. And if you really think that you were being “bullied” (even unintentionally), you’re crazy.

Of course it’s legitimate to compare the way in which IT departments responded to 9/11 with the way they deal with other kinds of service disruptions. I was working for Sun Microsystems at the time, and I remember how we helped customers to shift workloads, set up temporary data centers, and implement all sorts of fixes.

But thinking back to that period, when we were doing all of this while dealing with the emotional aspects of the situation – the death of friends, the uncertainty about further attacks – it becomes very clear that your originally Tweeted assertion is simply wrong. The two situations are NOT comparable. You weren’t “insensitive but making a legitimate point”; you were making a bad argument with a stupid analogy.

The smart thing to do would have been to blow it off with an “oops, my bad” Tweet. Your blog piece, with its attempt to link the reactions to “mass hysteria”, betrays a grotesque failure of imagination.

Actually any effort at invoking a reference to 9/11, a date in which thousands of people lost their lives, a true human tragedy that caused untold suffering for their families and friends, truly is distasteful at best, and deplorable at worst. It’s heartless. That you claim anyone who brings this up to your attention is somehow bullying you says volumes about your total lack of class in the situation.

i will say this sir, I did not intend to bully you. I did however intend to call out the incredulous nature of your statement. Comparing AWS outages to 9/11 is truly disgusting. I stand by that. Regardless of the context you believe I am missing.

During the 9/11 tragedy thousands of people were killed. More were injured and an entire country was brought to its knees. This is a far, far cry from Pinterest being down, okay? That’s my point. Using the 9/11 emergency as fodder for overdramatic statements on Twitter – and now to use this post as a way of trying to defensively save face and ultimately make us look bad? No sir, I’m sorry – but you are the one who is out of line here.

Yours was the hysterical comment, Mr. Krishnan. What you tagged “random late night blabber” I would consider “statement I just didn’t think out very well.” Given that, and given that you perhaps unwittingly equated Instagram being down for 12 hours to one of the most infamous acts of terror in recent history, I would humbly suggest you bow out of this one.

Perhaps in your head you did this: “I compared the situation after such outages with the kind of issues organizations in New York were facing after 9/11 in the context of business continuity.” But with only 140 characters, what came across was you comparing AWS outages with 9/11 IN GENERAL. Not cool, and you should be completely ashamed.

Then you turn around and try to deflect YOUR insensitive statement, by making it seem that someone calling you out on it was being a bully? Time to put your big boy pants on and grow up.

I hope you’ve learned the lessons that 1. sometimes your best intentions don’t come across on twitter, 2. Don’t relate 9/11 to anything, really and 3. when you’re a jerk, own up to it rather than make it someone else’s fault.

I still stand by my tweet. Even with 140 chars, I have made it clear in my tweet that I was talking about organizational impact of AWS outage and similar outage in the aftermath of 9/11. I have clearly highlighted that with phrases “in the cloud world” and “for the stakeholders”. Anyone who has been working in IT will understand how difficult it was then and how difficult it is every time AWS goes down. The tweet was meant to convey the difficulties organization could face as they trust their mission critical workloads on cloud providers and IT DID CONVEY THE DIFFICULTY for businesses. If you are not in IT and don’t understand what I was trying to convey, it is ok. It was not a tweet meant to non-IT folks. In fact, that tweet was meant to folks who are involved in IT AND those who are interested in cloud computing. I emphasize once again, it was not meant for non-IT folks and folks who have no interest in cloud computing. If the nature of social media puts the tweet in front of your eyes, I cannot do much about it.

Regarding the human impact of 9/11:

I have lost a friend in the tragedy and I have lost friends and family in terrorist attacks that happened elsewhere before many Americans even woke up to the idea of terrorism. I also have many many friends who lost their jobs just because their companies had servers in New York and critical data was lost. I know what is the human impact more personally than many who are out there attacking me. I don’t have to justify how I feel about the tragedy to ANYONE BUT ME. Seriously, I don’t give a damn about any personal attacks on me by misinterpreting my tweet.

Maybe some of those getting all pent up in here should study grammar 101 so that they can actually understand the context and intent of Krish’s tweet. thereafter they might actually be in a position to comment, until then they’re just rabble rousers looking for an argument. Meh, move on…